The Labyrinth of Osiris

September 17, 2012
A grisly murder in Jerusalem lights the fuse of Sussman’s powder-keg third thriller featuring Egyptian police detective Yusuf Ezz el-Din Khalifa (after 2005’s The Last Secret of the Temple), who’s reunited with his friend and Jerusalem counterpart, Arieh Ben-Roi. When investigative journalist Rivka Kleinberg is found garroted in an Armenian cathedral in Jerusalem, Ben-Roi follows up on the leads of Kleinberg’s last story to find disparate clues involving a powerful American mining corporation, an anticapitalist vigilante group calling itself “The Nemesis Agenda,” and a mining engineer’s disappearance in Egypt more than 80 years earlier. These “threads and connections, a whole spider’s web’s worth,” only twist, however, into even more byzantine intrigues embracing both Egypt’s ancient archeological treasures and modern-day religious clashes. Sussman dexterously weaves the many subplots into a taut skein, never losing sight of his characters’ humanity and troubled lives. Readers who enjoyed his previous cross-cultural thrillers will find much here to like. Agent: Laura Susjin, the Susjin Agency.

October 15, 2012
Taut, entertaining archaeological murder mystery-meets-spy thriller by genre-meister Sussman (The Hidden Oasis, 2009, etc.). Unless you're a Minotaur, you're intrigued by labyrinths. Unless you're way high up in the Illuminati or the Trilateral Commission, you harbor an endless fascination with the question of who really rules the world. Just don't ask too many questions, or you'll wind up like Rivka Kleinberg, silenced for getting a little too close to the answer to what the pharaohs of old have to do with latter-day powerbrokers of international finance and petroleum. If you've got to have bad guys, the Russian Mafia do nicely. As for the good ones, there are Sussman's stalwarts, Jerusalem cop Arieh Ben-Roi and his Egyptian pal and counterpart, Yusuf Khalifa, an unlikely pair of heroes. Both deliver results, though, Khalifa on his side of the line, and Ben-Roi on his ("OK, maybe he didn't always play things by the book, was a bit too free with his fists and a bit too loose in his interpretation of what was strictly permissible in the name of law enforcement"). Yeah, but that's Chinatown--er, the souk, that is. Sussman's story is not without its longueurs, but it moves along well enough, and there's some good thrills-and-spills stuff along the way. Moreover, there are at least three big pluses to the story: First, while unlikely cop pairings are old hat (see Hans Hellmut Kirst's 1963 novel The Night of the Generals, for one), it's good to see a nonhackneyed collaboration between Arabs and Israelis. Second, while Sussman's setup leaves wide openings for all the cliches of the whodunit genre, he doesn't indulge. And Sussman, a trained archaeologist, knows his stuff--and how to make a reader jump, too. A mayhem-rich view of the world through the eyes of mummies and villains, and a lot of fun.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2012

With Sussman's The Last Secret of the Temple and The Lost Army of Cambyses having each sold over a million copies worldwide, you can bet that readers will be interested in this next work. Det. Arieh Ben-Roi is stumped by the murder of crusading Israeli journalist Rivka Kleinberg, found dead in a Jerusalem cathedral (of all places), so for help he turns to longtime buddy Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor police. Fun!

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.